The iBook and the XO-1

3.5 years ago, my daughter and I assembled from parts an iBook. The donor computers for the new Franken-iBook came from eBay, and we had purchased them at the time to get our original 500Mhz dual USB white iBook going again. It had stopped charging its battery.

The original iBook was the camels nose under the tent wall: It was purchased used from someone at the office, and was mostly an experiment to see what the new Apple world with OS.X was all about. I was deeply curious about OS.X because I had used previous MacOS version and did not like them. OS.X, with its BSD underpinnings seemed to me to be the first OS from Apple I could get into.. and it was. That was then. Now we have an all Linux and Mac household, with MS Windows only around for historical reference and research.

That original (to us) iBook unit failed when something called the "DC-in" failed. Looks like this:

http://www.pbparts.com/shop.php//9226647.html

... but I did not know anything about Mac / iBook hardware at the time, so we bought a pile of broken iBooks from eBay to experiment on what it would take to get it going again: the iBook was sorely missed, and seemed worth the gamble / experiment.

iBooks are a nightmare to take apart. No kind way to put it. Apple really never meant for it to be and end-user operation. Here is the procedure over at ifixit for how one gets at the DC-in bit and replaces it: Even after having done it many times now, it still takes me at least two hours to get the iBook apart, the part replaced, and the iBook reassembled.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/iBook-G3-12-Inch/DC-In-Board/50/16/

Once the original iBook was running, my daughter and I looked at the pile of parts, and decided we had enough bits to get another iBook assembled as a gift. We tested various things like screens and motherboards, and got together a 500 Mhz iBook and gave it to my brother for Xmas in 2005. It was the perfect gift we thought: Something he would never buy for himself, something we had spent hours making, and would help free him and his wife from MS Windows.

He powered it up, used it for a bit, and we noticed something. It was not charging. It had been when we built it, but it was not anymore. He had the time  of one battery charge to play with it. Having just been through that "No Charge" thing on my iBook I suspected, and it did in fact turn out to be turned out to be the DC-in bit. His gift was a few days late, since I took it home, and replaced the DC-in with another from the junk pile and tested it again.

That DC-in lasted 3.5 years, but it apparently had failed again.

My brothers other computer is the Mint 4 handbuilt desktop box I gave him a while back, and that was fine for email, web surfing, and school work, but you can not sit if front of the TV looking up stuff, like "What other stuff did that actor / actress star in? They look so familiar....". The iBook had been that computer for them for years. But I had to haul it away for another screwdriver session.

At some point repairing iBooks, or really any computer, becomes like that joke about the hammer: "I like this hammer. It is my favorite one! I like it so much I have replaced the head twice and the handle three times."

I had with me (as at all times) my OLPC XO-1. I handed it to them as a replacement for the iBook till it was repaired, showed them how to open up the lid by first flipping up the ears (this always gets adults for some reason). There was general notice of how cute it was, how tiny the keyboard is, etc. By the time I got home I had an email from my brother from gmail and the XO-1 about how much they liked the little unit. It would be fine till the iBook was back among the living.

This made me feel better: While I was pretty sure the problem was the DC-in bit as ususal, if it *wasn't*, I was going to give them the XO-1 as their in-house laptop. That they actually liked it helped make that idea easier.

I ordered a new part from pbparts (although ifixit has them too), and a week later it arrived. I put it in last night, and the iBook is back among the living again. With a fresh rather than used part, I hope it will last another 3 years at least. The next thing to fail will probably be something other than the DC-in.. you would think. Although this is clearly not a quality part / design relative to other parts of the iBook... or any other Apple gear.

Once nice thing about the iBook is that it looks like, at least for now, that parts are plentiful, and this one can keep rising from the dead for years (like the proverbial favorite hammer): at least until Macbooks drop down to this pricepoint, when it will probably be time to move on.

Even nicer though is that the XO-1 was there and worked for them for what they wanted it to do: be the living room laptop. Given the way the XO-1 is built, it should be able to do that for a very very long time to come. Aaannnnd .... it is cute as a bug and runs Linux. Hard to beat that.

XO coming soon... sort of.

With apologies to Richard....

I just received an email from the OLPC Foundation. Key part:

Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.

I am looking forward to getting my unit, and knowing that someone someplace will soon be getting the one I donated.

I have read that they are making them at a clip of over 100,000 a month right now, and over half a million have already been made. That is both impressive and a drop in a bucket. The impressive part is to think that this innovative learning device is already out there, with Linux at its core, at a pace where several million new Linux users will join the ranks this year.

The problem is that there are seven billion plus people on the planet, so the XO is still far too rare. At its current production level, the temptation will be to have these units showing up on eBay or other unintended uses than in the hands of the children that need them. That is not good.

To really succeed the XO need to reach a ubiquity that makes it so commonplace that the idea of buying on on eBay approaches the idea of buying air there. That means billions of them. SO common that no one is taking them from the children as unique, interesting, or valuable, but rather giving them each one as intended so that they can use it as a learning tool. As long as it is cool and new, there will be problems.

I think this was probably part of the problem that Negroponte was addressing in his Wired interview, when he said:

Over the next few weeks… there'll be partnerships and changes with companies that can start rolling this out. What becomes pretty clear pretty quickly, you need people to copy it and do it at a larger scale. No matter what we do as OLPC or laptop.org, you're not going to be able to do the whole world. You want to be able to influence efficiently enough to have other people do it.

No wonder MS is sweating bullets and trying to get XP going ASAP on this gear. They are looking at billions of people not using their stuff.

One Laptop Per Child

A while back... April 13th, 2006 in fact, I wrote a blog post called "The Linux Inflection Point". Nearly two years ago... wow. Time flies.

I bring this up here because the "One Laptop Per Child" laptop, now called the "XO" is shipping. This has had all sorts of coverage in the media, and some of the most interesting has been that Microsoft has viewed the XO as a threat to its OS dominance, which I rather thought it should, and hinted at strongly in my post back then. Interestingly Intel has also gotten woofed about the XO since it ships with an AMD "Geode" processor, and they have taken the interesting step of building their own computer to parry it. This unit, called the ClassMatePC then the Asus Eee PC, and runs Linux although MS Windows XP is probably also do-able.

I imagine "do-able but not default" is a cost issue. MS has to be hating these low cost laptops in a big way. For example, here is an ad for the home version of MS Windows XP, and it is the same price or more than the hardware! And that is foe the crippled version of XP.

Add to that the MS Windows Vista will not even come close to running on any of this gear right now. Many of the worlds children growing up learning Linux: The XO has a "learn to program" app in it, and it is not teaching C Sharp, but is teaching Python.

Oh well, at least MS has the 360 to comfort themselves with. Our local Best Buy has a stack to the rafters of them. No Wii to be had anywhere, but plenty of 360's. Piles and piles of them. Ditto target. Ditto Walmart. No Wii. Just 360... and "no, thanks, I was really looking for the Wii after playing with my sons: The first video console I have ever actually wanted to own." To which I get the usual reply "Yeah: we are getting that a lot. Check back, we are getting more Wii's every week...."

Every year we try to give to various charities during this holiday season. It would not surprise me to read that this is not just a great time for retailers, but also charitable organizations of all kinds. My sister-in-law just told us that in lieu of gifts to us this year, she and her SO will be donating to a couple of charities in our name. My wife and I are doing the same thing for a couple of our family members.

That is all well and good, but this year I have to admit I am really jazzed about the charity gift we gave each other: the OLPC XO, via the Give One, Get One program. I have always thought Linux was a good idea of course, and also think literacy these days includes computer literacy, so I think the XO is an amazing and world changing idea. I have been on board since I heard about it.

Now I will actually also have one, and can look at it and touch it and blog about this awesome new member of my Linux family here at the house. I might even learn Python now... :)